Southern Poverty Law Center Jumps The Shark: Social Conservative Political Organizations are Hate Groups

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says it will not back down from its decision to label the Family Research Council and other socially conservative groups as hate groups, on par with the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, for their views about homosexuality.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins recently asked SPLC to retract the hate group designation, but SPLC Intelligence Project Director Mark Potok told The Daily Caller that will never happen.

SPLC’s Winter 2010 edition of its “Intelligence Report” magazine lists the Family Research Council as a hate group alongside the American Family Association, the Traditional Values Coalition, and 11 other social conservative groups. The report, titled “18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda,” also lists five other organizations as being anti-gay – such as Concerned Women for America and the National Organization for Marriage — but refrains from classifying them as hate groups.

According to SPLC, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and the other similar groups spread “known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling.”

“Labeling people and groups as hate groups is laying the groundwork to then charge them with hate crimes using the full force of government to oppress people for their beliefs,” said Concerned Women America President Wendy Wright.

The reason for this claim is that some members of these organizations say some wrong-headed or merely debatable stuff about gays -- such as claiming that gays molest kids at a higher rate than straight men do.

That's a tricky one. That stat seems misused by anti-gay activists, but, on the other hand, a fact's a fact -- I've always been very annoyed at how this factoid is dismissed by gay activists. It is true that incidents of homosexual molestation occur at a higher rate, controlling for the straight/gay ratio, than incidents of "straight" molestation.

The typical manner of dismissing this factoid is to claim that incidents of pedophilia are neither straight nor gay, but simply pedophilliac, and categorizing them as one or the other is, I guess, some type of category mistake. So there is no such thing, this argument goes, as "gay molestation."

I don't know if that's true, but it seems like a suspectly easy form of argument to make. While that argument might hold true for a minority of child predators -- those who seem to be attracted to nothing but the too-young age, and are omnisexual in their choice of victims -- it seems that most child-abusers have a very strict preference as far as gender, and it seems strange to me to claim, with little argument offered as to why it should be this way, that a man who prefers to molest boys exclusively isn't "homosexual" at all, not even a little bit.

Really? Not at all? They're "straight" but prefer young boys? How does that work?

On the other hand, this factoid tends to get misused. Child molestation is a rare phenomenon (not rare enough, of course) so differences between "very rare" and "just slightly above very rare" in this area of sexual evil seems to be a very weak foundation for building an entire theory of generalized gay dysfunction on.

It getting to this conclusion -- gays are psychologically screwed-up and have a much higher propensity to sexual evil due to their dysfunction -- a much more important factor has to be ignored. Because while gay molestation occurs at a higher rate than straight molestation (controlled for population of gays/straights), another factor is so, so much more important it's a willful act to ignore it: Men molest at hugely higher rates than women.

So would we take this same line of reasoning and call men generally dysfunctional?

In a way, we do, sort of, because we all are aware that children are safer when looked after by women than men, and most people would never consider, say, hiring a male babysitter. But while acknowledging that men are much more likely to be involved in sexual evil than women, we don't create a grader, unified theory of male sexual evil.

Well, feminists do, of course, but that's easy for them, as they've deemed men to be the Enemy and when at War it's expected that you can propagandize, as unfairly as you like, against the Enemy.

That said, the citation of a a group's citation of a fact, which is, you know, either sort of true or just plain true depending on your perspective, seems a very weak reason to brand the Family Research Council a "hate group."

I think the real reason the SPLC has branded the FRC a "hate group" is because that group gets a lot more agitated about TV shows or movies that include, say, a non-pornographic gay kiss, where they'd never rate a show featuring a similar straight kiss as making a show inappropriate for children or worthy of moral condemnation. The SPLC is taking the position that both are the same and to treat them differently is "hate."

It's not. The sexual left really has to get over this. People get wiggy about gay stuff, especially parents, who don't want their kids seeing anything other than standard-issue chaste sexual behavior between appropriate partners. That tendency may retard the gay agenda, in as much as it prevents their goal of a society that makes no differentiation whatsoever between gay sex and straight sex, but that's not hate. That may be an unfortunate outcome for them, but you can't call someone a "hater" just because they, like 10,000 generations before them, find gay sex to be deviant and strange.